Margaret Harrist writes, "Ready for the next chapter in the continuing saga of technology siring big-time business disruption? This year's SXSW Interactive conference left little doubt of the protagonists: virtual reality and artificial intelligence.

Companies ranging from startups to Samsung and McDonalds (yes, McDonalds) plunged attendees into an alternate reality that let them fly, ski, speed, and explore - and even decorate the inside of a Happy Meal box. A stream of speakers explored whether AI will change our work. (The short answer is yes.)..."

"Formula E has unveiled the AI-powered race car that will be used in its Roborace competition for driverless vehicles.

Ten teams, each with two cars, will compete in a series of one-hour races over the Formula E championship season, which starts later this year. All teams will have the same driverless cars; what sets them apart will be the artificial intelligence they use to control them.

Formula E announced the Roborace series last year, calling it a 'battle of algorithms.' The driverless cars will reportedly hit speeds of 300kph (186mph)..."

"Bart Peintner has been closely involved with important developments in artificial intelligence through its recent resurgence. At SRI, one of the world's hotbeds of AI research, he pursued work that pressed the limits of natural language processing and user-behavior modeling. Now, as CTO and co-founder of startup Loop AI Labs, he is furthering the cause of unsupervised machine intelligence -- also known as deep machine learning -- for applications. It's important because teaching machines to do human's work can be labor intensive..."

"Conversation fillers such as 'hmm' and 'uh-huh' may seem like insignificant parts of human conversation, but they're critical to improving communication between humans and artificial intelligence.

So argues Alan Black, a professor in the Language Technologies Institute at the Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, who specializes in speech synthesis and ways to make artificially intelligent speech sound more real..."

"Artificial intelligence is developing much faster than we thought. Just last month, Google's DeepMind AI beat Lee Sedol, a legendary Go player, at his own game in a defining moment for the industry. What enabled this win is a relatively new AI technique called deep learning, which is transforming AI.

Until deep learning was introduced, even the best AI systems were always highly tuned for specific problems and required many rules to operate successfully. But deep learning has changed that, causing many researchers to abandon classical AI approaches..."

Peter blogs, "The title's not mine. It comes from a video done for us by ESG, based on their white paper, which looks at the TCO of building your own Hadoop cluster vs buying one ready-built (Oracle Big Data Appliance). You should watch or read, depending on your preference, or even just check out the infographic. The conclusion could be summed up as "better, faster, cheaper, pick all three". Which is not what you'd expect. But they found that it's better (quicker to deploy, lower risk, easier to support), faster (from 2X to 3X faster than a comparable DIY cluster) and cheaper (45% cheaper if you go with list pricing)..."

Javier blogs, "Partners - You're already familiar with the benefits of Oracle Exadata and now it's available in the cloud.
It brings more opportunities for you to scale your business in innovative ways and at speed.
Moving to the Oracle Cloud is simplicity itself..."

John blogs, "This is the first in a series of blogs to give the Oracle VM community some additional information on the 3.4 release that we announced last week. To start, we are going to share a little more information on the performance gains and capacity increases that were delivered with this updated version of Oracle VM..."

Lenovo is continuing to partner with other vendors as it looks to rapidly grow its capabilities in the data center and extend the reach of its server businesses.

Most recently, Lenovo is teaming with Nexenta, which offers an open-source software-defined storage (SDS) solution, to integrate Nexenta's technology into Lenovo's x86 servers. The strategic partnership will include not only bringing the products together, but also developing joint go-to-market strategies. The goal is to develop offerings that leverage both vendors' technologies and address the rapid growth in data that is being generated by such trends as mobile computing, big data analytics and the cloud..."

"Most IT professionals are fully aware that if they have a storage performance problem that a flash based storage system is the answer for them. Flash, to some extent, makes performance a commodity. Almost any flash system can deliver more than 100,000 IOPS and many deliver 5 to 10 times that amount. In reality most data centers have a specific set of use cases that justifies a flash-based system. The problem is most flash vendors offer a single choice. It seems like, for them, all of your problems are the same as everyone else's problems..."

"Deloitte has published its annual technology trends report entitled 'Tech Trends 2016 - Innovating in the Digital Era'. The report, seventh in a row, looks at the technology trends that will disrupt businesses in the next two years, create new opportunities and shake up various industries.

According to the report, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are the two technologies to make the biggest impact this year, with virtual reality probably hitting the $1 billion market value this year..."

"Quantum computing is now within closer reach thanks to a major breakthrough in which scientists have demonstrated that a key building block can be assembled.

Quantum computers are based on atomic-scale quantum bits, or qubits, that can represent both 0 and 1 simultaneously, and they are expected to deliver huge performance gains over traditional computers. Realizing that potential, however, depends on the ability to build working quantum circuits..."

Diana blogs, "Deploy a full private cloud in minutes with training on OpenStack for Oracle Solaris 11.

This popular open source computing cloud platform provides comprehensive self-service environments for sharing and managing compute, network and storage resources through a centralized web-based portal.

OpenStack has been integrated into all the Oracle Solaris core technology..."

"The Digital Currency Initiative (DCI) in part with the MIT Media Lab has announced in a blog post that a $900,000 Bitcoin Developer fund has been started to help fund independent research of Bitcoin associated technology.

Appropriately, the fund has a specific wallet set up to accept funding donations in the cryptocurrency well. The fund will remain open for contribution for the foreseeable future as long as a need for providing a home for Bitcoin developers is needed..."

"A lot of people have been saying how the blockchain is much bigger than Bitcoin itself, and they are right for the most part. Even though the Bitcoin protocol is powered by blockchain technology, the capabilities of distributed ledgers are not just linked to the digital currency ecosystem. A recent report by Citi seems to be thinking along those same lines, although most of their use cases are still focused on the financial aspect. This disruptive technology can change a lot of things as we know them today, that much is certain..."

BIT is sponsored by Grayscale Investments, which is owned by Digital Currency Group, which invests in the blockchain and digital currency ecosystem. BIT is a private, open-ended trust that invests only in bitcoin. Hence, the value is based primarily on the bitcoin price..."

"Caribbean digital currency exchange Bitt has received $4m in new funding from online retailer Overstock.com.

The deal, announced today, comes after Bitt's February launch of a blockchain-backed digital version of the Barbados dollar. The startup raised $1.5m in seed funding last March from local VC firm Avatar Capital..."

"Is bitcoin a safe asset? David Andolfatto, vice president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, acknowledges in his blog, 'MacroMania,' that bitcoin can be volatile over a short time span. But when people speak about safe assets, it's not the same as providing a stable rate of return..."

"The perfect data center masks the complexity of the hardware it houses from the requirements of the software it hosts. Compute, memory, and storage capacities are all presented to applications and services as contiguous pools. Provisioning these resources has become so automated that it's approaching turnkey simplicity.

This is the part of the story where the open source movement stands up, takes a bow, and thanks its various supporters, agents, and parents for making everything possible for it. To say that open source efforts are responsible for the current state of data center networking would be like crediting earthquakes for the shapes of continents. Yes, they play an undeniably formative role. But the outcome is more often the result of all the elements - many of them random - they put into play..."

"For the last three years, I have rounded up the most popular open source project management tools for Opensource.com readers. As there continues to be major reader interest in this area, I decided to take a look back at the tools we covered in 2014 and 2015, and give you updates on all of these projects. I looked to see which projects had new releases, notable new and improved features, and more.

Let's take a look at each of these projects and try to answer some of the questions readers have had in the comments of last year's edition, including which are still in active development, provide hosting options, offer a mobile solution, and more..."

"Soon you will be able to run some of the best open source tools that are available for Linux on Windows system, natively. The move is a natural progression of the way Microsoft is bringing the Windows and Linux world closer to each other.

If you are on a Windows 10 system you will be able to open 'bash' from the start menu that will open Windows command prompt running Ubuntu's /bin/bash. It's more or less like running Ubuntu terminal 'in' Windows..."

Caryl blogs, "Here at Oracle ISV Engineering, we deal with hundreds of applications on a daily basis. Most of them need to support multiple operating systems (OS) environments including Oracle Solaris. These applications are from all types of diverse industries - banking, communications, healthcare, gaming, and more. Each application varies in size from dozens to hundreds of millions of lines of code...."

Lapses in coding can leave systems vulnerable to attackers. But examining thousands and thousands of lines of code for a wide array of potential weaknesses is no easy task. Thankfully, a variety of tools are emerging to help ensure the security of your code. With the help of capabilities such as static analysis, these tools not only flag possible issues but enforce security a priority in the development process.

Following are five tools aimed at analyzing your code for security flaws, ranging from open source to commercial offerings, available as on-premises solutions or services in the cloud.

"DevOps is a buzzed-about industry term, yet many companies are still trying to figure out how to start the journey to a DevOps transformation. Each organization's journey will be different, but planning and starting the journey always should include assessing the current state of a company's software delivery process, quantifying the objectives and plotting the 'route.' This begins with a discovery process..."

"There are plenty of tools to monitor MySQL performance and troubleshoot a server, but they don't always perfect match for a MySQL developer or administrator's for their common needs, or may not work in some situations, such as remote or over the web monitoring.

Luckily, there are variety of open source tools created by MySQL community to fill the gaps. On the other hand, it's very difficult to locate these tools via web searches, that's the reason we've compiled 4 command line tools to monitor MySQL database uptime, load and performance in Linux..."

Eric blogs, "Oracle recently launched a new family of offerings designed to enable organizations to easily move to the cloud and remove some of the biggest obstacles to cloud adoption. These first-of-a-kind services provide CIOs with new choices in where they deploy their enterprise software and a natural path to easily move business critical applications from on premises to the cloud. Oracle's new cloud services place the same hardware, software, and operational services available in its public cloud directly into your data center and behind your firewall..."

Karen dela Torre writes, "Trailblazers though they were, finance departments have quickly become technology laggards. How did this happen? Believe it or not, corporate finance was once in the vanguard of technology adoption. By the end of the middle of the 1990s, nearly every large organization had some form of ERP (enterprise resource planning) system in place; even small and midsize companies relied on finance or accounting software installed on their desktop PCs. Why? Because the global economy had reached a tipping point where the risk of doing nothing was greater than the risk of change..."

"Most organizations now have some presence in the cloud, but data security remains a top concern, especially when business units acquire cloud services independent of the IT department. To help illustrate the problems such practices can create, the Cloud Security Alliance has compiled its list of 'The Treacherous 12: Cloud Computing Top Threats in 2016.'..."

"If you're considering -- or merely curious about -- converting your data center to a private cloud, we'll help you learn about the management, scalability, and efficiency improvements you may gain..."

"Over the years, I've found that trying to select the best Linux desktop environment is almost an impossible task. There are oodles of considerations, ranging from level of user experience to individual user preferences. Despite these challenges, there are some solid considerations we can evaluate individually.

In this article, I'm going to hit on a number of Linux desktop environments. I'll look at what about them is appealing and why folks are inclined to think of them as 'best' over other alternatives..."

"A growing number of enterprises believe hybrid cloud strategies will help bring their operations and customer service into the digital business era. However, many of them haven't yet mapped out their plans for achieving those goals, according to a recent analysis by EMC and VMware..."

"Ed Mahon, CIO at Kent State University, was bitten by the cloud bug in 2012 and is methodically marching the school to the cloud model, with early benefits being better use of resources and the ability to focus IT staff on bigger picture efforts, among other things. In fact Mahon is so smitten with the cloud he wrote a book about it, 'Transitioning the Enterprise to the Cloud: A Business Approach,' which is an Amazon #1 New Release and is also available on Barns & Noble.com. Networ World Editor in Chief John Dix recently talked with Mahon about what he has learned..."

"In discussions with senior executive leadership and other decision makers, simply referencing 'the cloud' without all parties understanding of the vast differences among various cloud solutions and the unique requirements and risks of each can be cause for real concern.

The potential benefits of cloud computing are well known, and many vendors broadcast these benefits to sell their cloud solutions or services. While proponents of the cloud will often point to the 'Cloud First' policy to try to force the adoption of cloud technologies, this policy was intended to ensure agencies consider the use of cloud computing, but it does not require moving to the cloud where it does not make sense or is not cost effective to do so..."

"Two-thirds of IT security professionals say that network security has become more difficult over the last two years with growing complexity in managing heterogeneous network environments.

A new report finds that CISOs struggle with right policies and processes to keep up with deployments of a myriad of cloud technologies.

The survey of 150 security professionals, commissioned by network security vendor Tufin and Enterprise Strategy Group, indicates the major factors in securing IT infrastructure are the increasing number of devices joining the network, more technologies in use, and a rise in new applications being deployed..."

"The majority of CIOs now perceive of themselves as their organization's primary driver of a business and IT transformation, according to a recent survey from Cognizant. The report, titled 'Being Digital: How and Why CIOs Are Reinventing Themselves for a New Age,' indicates that CIOs must make key contributions to strategic planning, while emerging as a 'chief inclusion officer' who fosters an open culture of innovation. CIOs also need to take a hands-on role in leading digital programs/initiatives..."

"Bart Murphy's efforts to consolidate IT operations of the six divisions of the CareWorks Family of Companies worked out so well that when the company was acquired by York Risk Services Group in 2013, his new bosses asked him to scale up and perform similar duties for the companies comprising the York family.

CareWorks encompasses Ohio's largest workers' compensation managed care organization, third-party administration divisions, field case management, risk and safety management services, as well as a technical consulting group that Murphy also heads..."

"There's one piece of technology IT leaders can use to become more efficient and better leaders - their brains

Our brains are our most valuable assets, so figuring out how to optimise them is paramount to achieving financial, career and relationship success. In essence, we want to generate strong 'light bulb moments,' which are novel solutions and insights..."

"If you're looking to advance your career in the direction of the CIO's seat, the first thing you need to do is learn what it really means to be an IT leader. For starters, it could mean loving technology a little less. That's the advice of Kathy Harris, executive recruiter and managing director of Harris Allied..."

"Technology has always been an innovative means to leverage competitive advantage in the marketplace. Technology has essentially provided the next evolution of business, interconnecting global interests, and promoting commerce faster and more efficiently than had previously been achieved.

As a result, companies have become more technology dependent as well as driven, fostering a need for the most advanced technology to support their business infrastructures. Technology has provided opportunity for smaller businesses to compete on the same playing field as larger competitors..."

"We have all come to take our computers for granted, especially at work. We assume that our creative endeavours, that report we've agonised over for weeks, and that big new client proposal will all be there just where we left them when we logged off yesterday.

We also assume that the company accounts will be working perfectly too, telling us who the company owes money to, and who owes money to the company, as well as processing VAT, tax and of course paying the wages at the end of the month. We count on the number crunchers to use our data to track trends, monitor performance and spot new opportunities..."

"If you've ever looked around your company headquarters and thought to yourself: 'I should be running things,' maybe you're right. For those with vision, tech chops, and people skills -- along with a laser focus on turning a profit -- being a company's tech lead may be the right fit.

But you have questions: 'How do I get started? Do I need a graduate degree? And what's it like to manage effectively at the highest levels?'..."

"Simplifying IT and streamlining IT operations is the best strategy for better meeting business goals, according to Chris Borkenhagen, vice president of IT at travel expense management company Concur. In an interview with The Enterprisers Project, he explains how this works at his company..."

"Disaster recovery is pretty important, right? You need to be able to work at some point if your network goes down because of a major disaster, whether it's a natural disaster or a result of some sort of network invasion or massive failure. While there are a lot of acronyms in the technology management industry, when it comes to disaster recovery and continuity, the most important two are RPO and RTO. RPO is the Recovery Point Objective, or the point in time in the past that you will recover to. Recovery Time Objective refers to the point in the future when you'll be up and running once again..."

"You can plan for it. You can train for it. You can create as many systems designed to prevent it as you want, but at the end of the day disasters still occur and they happen when we least expect them.

Whether it's a natural disaster that knocks a data centre offline or a cyber attack that ravages critical systems, there's no shortage of damage that can happen to a business during this time. According to Gartner, companies can lose an average of $5600 per minute in an outage - $300,000 per hour..."

"Business continuity is hard to illustrate to business owners. Downtime sucks, but not every business has a true understanding of how it could potentially impact them. All they think is, 'We're never been down for that long before.' They can't understand the true value of a business service that they've never used before. From a business executive perspective, that conversation and that value typically comes in the form of sharing the real numbers..."

"Growing pressure from regulators to improve security of protected public information makes this a good time to reexamine your disaster recovery plan. Veronica Miller, compliance solutions manager at Bluelock, a Disaster-Recovery-as-a-Service vendor, or DRaaS, gives some tips..."

"Every CIO's key priority is, first and foremost, guaranteeing a network infrastructure that is always available. There is no denying that Internet assets have rocketed in importance.

Business continuity solutions are now mission-critical components of the enterprise toolkit, particularly as Internet assets, and indeed Internet Performance, directly affect both core business tasks and, as a consequence, the bottom line. The C-suite is well aware that outages can have a hugely negative impact on profits and business reputation..."

"When you work at an entity that collects sensitive, real-time data and is responsible for keeping it up-to-date and available to certain public institutions, you'd think a solid backup and disaster recovery plan would be high on the list of organizational priorities. In theory, yes -- but all it takes is one hotshot manager to break what didn't need to be fixed in the first place.

With this corporate body, branch offices were located in cities throughout several states, and at one time each office maintained its own semi-autonomous IT infrastructure. The sites had their own redundant file servers, database servers, and authentication servers, as well as on-premises IT staff..."

"The coming artificial intelligence revolution will dramatically change the project management discipline. Three capability areas are ripe for improvement.

After seeing recent industry presentations on bots, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), I see the application of these technologies changing the practice of project management. The question is, is this future desirable or will we have a choice?..."

"For the last three years, I have rounded up the most popular open source project management tools for Opensource.com readers. As there continues to be major reader interest in this area, I decided to take a look back at the tools we covered in 2014 and 2015, and give you updates on all of these projects. I looked to see which projects had new releases, notable new and improved features, and more.

Let's take a look at each of these projects and try to answer some of the questions readers have had in the comments of last year's edition, including which are still in active development, provide hosting options, offer a mobile solution, and more..."

"University of Ottawa researchers say their discovery that a twisted optical beam in a vacuum travels more slowly than the speed of light could be a boon for quantum computing and communications, and could benefit enterprise IT shops down the line.

Their research, which began in late 2013, is outlined in the paper "Observation of subluminal twisted light in vacuum," published in The Optical Society's Optica journal..."

"In this Introduction to IPv6 training course, expert author Tom Coffeen will teach you everything you need to know about IPv6. This course is designed for users that already have a basic understanding of IPv4 networking.

You will start by learning about the history of IPv6 and why it is necessary. From there, Tom will teach you about the IPv6 address, including format, scopes, structure, and planning. This video tutorial also covers IPv6 address types, such as global unicast addresses, IPv6 unique local addresses, and IPv6 multicast. Finally, you will learn about ICMPv6, IPv6 Neighbor Discovery, and auto-addressing, as well as IPv6 DNS and routing.

Once you have completed this computer based training course, you will have learned everything you need to know about IPv6..."

"Organizations embracing the Internet of Things should consider using microservices and the cloud as a way to boost efficiency and minimize costs...

The Internet of Things has generated a mix of enthusiasm and concern. There's no question that a web of sensors and controllers could enrich our lives -- but it could also be misused in disastrous ways. Fortunately, the cloud can help us harness the good of the Internet of Things and largely prevent the bad..."

"The Internet of Things (IoT) and subsequent explosion of connected devices have created a world of opportunities we might never have anticipated. But have these new capabilities and associated connectivity come at the expense of security? We often hear how insecure embedded devices around us are and with sensors communicating from the most seemingly benign of devices - watches, thermostats, kettles and even garden equipment - what are the key challenges for organisations in making IoT devices that are safer by design? What are the design constraints that lead to these devices being insecure?..."

"A myriad of point-tools are involved in every organization's software production. Some of our enterprise customers report using over 50 tools along their pipeline, from code development all the way to releasing into Production. For the majority of development organisations today, these tools are comprised of a mix of commercial and Open Source (OSS) technologies..."

"In this special guest feature, Dan Graham of Teradata, explores why IoT data, despite having useful applications, is eroding in value faster than transaction data. The trends - lacking monetary data fields, most sensor data will become low value in hours, days or weeks as they are replaced by fresh collections of the same sensor data. Architectures and systems will be forced to compensate for this rapid decline to cope with retention and processing costs. With over 30 years in IT, Dan Graham has been a DBA, Strategy Director in IBM's Global BI Solutions division, and General Manager of Teradata's high end servers..."

"The Internet of Things gets more notice in the press for skillets that have Internet connectivity and car functions that you'll never use, but you'll likely see its true benefits in business before the acclaimed WiFi toaster goes mainstream. There is little you can do to prevent progress (nor should you fight against it), but unpreparedness can leave you and your business in a bad state of affairs..."

"The industrial Internet of Things doesn't just show up in a box at the door ready to use. It takes integration to deploy IoT systems and get the maximum benefit.

That's because IoT isn't one thing, but many linked together in pursuit of a business objective. For example, making power consumption data more accurate and up to date may require smart meters at customers' homes, networks to carry the data collected, and analytical software in the cloud..."

"You couldn't ask for a better segue than this, from Smith's book about the pitfalls of automotive security to our community's solution to them - that is, The Linux Foundation's Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) new Unified Code Base (UCB) distribution. AGL is a Linux Foundation Workgroup dedicated to creating open-source software solutions for automotive applications..."

Ubuntu-maker Canonical and BQ, an electronics maker based in Spain, opened the BQ Aquaris M10 Ubuntu Edition for preorder today, with global shipping prices starting at 259.90 (about $291). The devices are slated to start shipping in early April..."

"A 451 Research report estimates that currently, the world's largest region in terms of total operational space for colocation is Asia Pacific.

The global colocation market will reach $33.2 billion by 2018, according to 451 Research's latest quarterly Datacenter Knowledgebase (DCKB) release, which tracks nearly 4,800 data centers operated by 1,286 companies worldwide.
In the fourth quarter of 2015, the data center colocation market saw $27 billion in annualized revenue, with the majority of this revenue (54.6 percent) continuing to be derived from local providers with less than $500 million in annualized colocation revenues.

The company estimated that the global colocation market would grow in terms of total operational square feet from today's 132.4 million square feet to 176.5 million by the end of 2018..."

"The ultimate identifier - DNA - is impossible to spoof, but comes with some major issues. Although DNA can be easily extracted, analysing it is incredibly hard to do in real time. If not done correctly, it can also be inaccurate. There are also worries about losing such a critical piece of data that can't be reset or revoked..."

"Active Directory is a data directory service using passwords that Microsoft developed decades ago for Windows domain networks. It is included in most Windows Server operating systems as a set of processes and services. Initially, Active Directory was only in charge of centralized domain management; it has since branched out to include cloud systems. For years, Active Directory has been a target of cyber-criminals in their attempts to hack passwords and crack enterprise systems and steal, damage or obfuscate data.

A highly secured Active Directory environment can help prevent attacks from being successful and protect critical data, but do you know where to start this hardening?..."

"Digital business is placing unprecedented demand on identity services. Customer and workforce profile data is needed to drive most aspects of mobile, Web and Internet of Things (IoT) engagement and productivity. Yet, legacy identity and access management (IAM) systems and directory servers, most of which were built using technology from the 1990s, weren't designed to handle these modern use cases.

The requirements for today's identity and access management solutions are vastly different..."

"The White House published the Cybersecurity National Action Plan, or CNAP, in February to address what the president sees as weakness in cybersecurity preparedness across the country -- problems within the federal government, private sector business, even within citizens' private lives..."

"DDoS attacks are one of the most common forms of cyber threat activity on the net. They can be deployed by the most dangerous state-sponsored actors and the hobby hacker alike, taking on several different forms. Over the decades we've seen DDoS attacks evolve from rudimentary volumetric attacks, designed to knock sites offline, into far more complex and malicious threats...."

"Firewalls are still central to most network defense strategies, new State of the Firewall report says...

In spite of lots of advanced technology and moves to add many more layers of security to most enterprise defenses, firewalls aren't going anywhere soon as the heart of the cybersecurity toolset, according to a new report out today. Based on a survey of over 600 IT security practitioners, the State of the Firewall Report shows that the firewall is as entrenched as ever in modern network defense strategies..."

"First in a series of two articles about the history of signature-based detections, and how the methodology has evolved to identify different types of cybersecurity threats.

Used in the context of an outdated and manually intensive technology focused on older classes of threats, there's little wonder why vendors would seek to distance the legacy term 'signature' from their advanced detection technology. Vendors haven't necessarily been deceptive in the labeling of their latest generation of techniques; it's often just easier to create a new label for something than to fully explain the context and evolution of what preceded it..."

There's no getting around that security incidents will happen. The best I can hope for is that they don't completely ruin my day and that they aren't specific to my organization, so that I can write about them and possibly help my readers through similar situations.

"Feinstein Institute for Medical Research, North Memorial Health Care of Minnesota, and St. Joseph Health System made the headlines recently with their million dollar settlements for their data breaches. This means there are a few more executives added to the ranks of those wishing they spent more time, attention and resources on security..."

"We're in a turbulent marketplace right now, this much is clear. We frequently hear terms like 'war on talent,' 'purple squirrels,' and 'a candidate driven market' from our clients in the IT staffing space. Many of them are seeing increased occurrences of false starts, drop offs and rate wars. There's no question that top tech talent is extremely difficult to find. So how can IT staffing and recruiting firms source, place and retain the best talent for their clients in the current business climate?..."

"Looking for work in tech right now? Looking for ways to expand your role at your current job? I've put on my prognosticator's cap for a look at which software is worth your time. You'll find content management systems, 3D modeling, and programming frameworks in the mix. If you're a hiring manager, it's worth a look to see which software is being used, and where..."

"Being first in and last out is a good thing right? It gets you noticed and gives you the time to really push forward in your career as well as being identified as a hard worker.

As it turns out, being a workaholic may be harming your career more than you think. Being a workaholic can often lead to ill health, increased time off and most importantly a worse performance while you are at work..."

"As a CIO, you've probably asked a lot of IT job candidates a lot of interview questions. But have you ever inquired as to whether a potential hire would like to be a particular kind of gerbil? Or pose a challenge that involves weighing an elephant? Believe it or not, actual tech position candidates were asked about these and other off-the-wall topics during real interviews. It's all part of Glassdoor's annual 'Oddball' job interview questions list, and we're highlighting the tech candidate-specific questions here..."

"Be honest, you've silently wished for the day your co-worker 'Joe' (not his real name of course) would hear two little words that would make your life SO much easier.

Once you realize you've spent more time dreaming about 'Joe' hearing, 'You're Fired' than wondering who Donald Trump will offend next on the campaign trail, it's time to quit watching 'The Apprentice' reruns and start planning your approach..."

"Recognizing what you don't know is deceptively difficult, but it's often the difference between project success and failure...

No matter what you do in IT, one certainty persists: You will have questions. Very few tasks and zero projects come completely packaged and ready to go -- one item or another will always requires further definition. But the key to moving through that process effectively is to question your questions. The ability to construct the right query is an undervalued talent indeed..."

"Bad hires are expensive based on an interesting survey performed by CareerBuilder revealed that 41 percent of companies estimate that a bad hire costs more than $25,000; 25 percent of companies said a bad hire costs more than $50,000. And the higher the position, the higher those numbers become..."

"Containers -- and their cousins, microservices -- are finally entering production environments in the enterprise, where they give organizations more flexible ways to deploy applications in the cloud. As the container and microservices ecosystem continues to evolve rapidly, these are projects to watch..."

"Containers - the data center technology you've heard all about, but probably not seen often in production - are finally making their way into the real world. That's according to a survey out this week from NGINX.

Titled '2016 Future of Application Development and Delivery Survey,' the report reveals data based on responses from more than 1,800 IT professionals. It covers a broad range of topics related to application development and deployment, ranging from cloud trends to security issues..."

"Placing a database in the cloud significantly changes its security threat landscape. While many of the traditional on-premises risks remain - data leakage risk from privileged users with access to the data, the presence of unidentified sensitive data and SQL injection attacks are some examples - the cloud introduces its own additional risks.

There are also ways to leverage the cloud by outsourcing some of the risk mitigation to the cloud provider. HexaTier recently surveyed 574 IT professionals and here are their concerns..."

"It's well known that the average downtime for an enterprise company can cause millions of dollars in lost revenue, and for small businesses, a major outage can even be catastrophic. That's why it's critical that every business implement some kind of backup strategy to protect their assets in case of an emergency.

In honor of World Backup Day on March 31, The VAR Guy gathered some expert tips from vendors to help you protect your enterprise data from bad actors, natural disasters and other unforeseen circumstances..."

"In this third approach to improving information security incident response, CSO maps your route to successful backup procedure tests and reviews. By properly testing and ensuring that your backups are existent and recoverable when data disaster rears its gruesome head, you can rest in the knowledge that information security incidents that could rob your data and interrupt its use will not also leave you without your data altogether..."

"Big-data projects will never meet expectations if the underlying data is inaccurate or missing. It's time to fix the 'dysfunctional cycle of data chaos,' says a report by TechVision Research...

Before companies can do fancy things with data, like predictive analytics and data monetization, they need to fix the 'broken fundamentals of data,' according to a new report by TechVision Research..."

"All too often, we data professionals are our own nemesis when it comes to handling data. Many of the mistakes data professionals and system administrators make are not as destructive as an all-out data breach, but failing to recognize the danger in our own habits increases the risk that the business will fall short of its goals..."

"Artificial intelligence is currently making a resurgence since the 1990s. Today, the focus is on machine learning and statistical algorithms. This shift has served AI well. Since machine learning and statistics provide effective algorithm solutions to certain kinds of problems, such as board games, spam detection, voice and image recognition, etc.

"The Open Data Platform Initiative (ODPi) released its first ODPi Runtime Specification and test suite Monday as part of its goal to ensure a standard deployment model for enterprise big data applications across Apache Hadoop distributions..."

"This is the culmination of this whole year's work," says John Mertic, senior manager of ODPi.

"Over $100 billion in fines were paid in US for non-compliance since 2007! More than $2.5 Billion in 2015 alone was a result of incomplete and inaccurate data used for complying with Anti-Money Laundering (AML) regulations. It's not just financial institutions, but most firms are sitting on a ticking time bomb. How?

"The insideBIGDATA Guide to Streaming Analytics is a useful new resource directed toward enterprise thought leaders who wish to gain strategic insights into this exciting new area of technology. Many enterprises find themselves at a key inflection point in the big data timeline with respect to streaming analytics technology. There is a huge opportunity for direct financial and market growth for enterprises by leveraging streaming analytics. Streaming analytics deployments are being engaged by companies in a broad variety of different use cases..."

"Big Data as a Service (BDaaS) continues to expand its area of influence in the world. More and more industries are considering and evaluating their need of adopting such services and the potential benefits that can be gained. There are multiple factors that must be assessed before adopting BDaaS. Many wonder what type of companies are adopting big data and what they're level of satisfaction has been. Knowing and understanding the most common big data adoption challenges is a crucial step as well. Many find it difficult to know where to start in this journey of consideration and evaluation..."

"Tablets may never again be the consumer sensation they once were, but they are finding new life among professionals.
Apple took aim at that market in announcing a second iPad Pro model last week. Samsung started selling the Windows-based Galaxy TabPro S the week before, while Microsoft doubled down on its Surface tablet business last fall with Surface Book, a laptop whose keyboard pops off to leave behind a tablet. Google has its own using Android, the Pixel C..."

"Backup on personal computers or servers is always important to prevent permanent data loss. Therefore getting to know different backup tools is very important especially for System Administrators who work with large amounts of enterprise level data and even on personal computers.

It is always a good practice to keep on backing up data on our computers, this can either be done manually or configured to work automatically. Many backup tools have different features that allow users to configure the the type of backup, time of backup, what to backup, logging backup activities and many more

In this article, we shall take a look at 14 outstanding backup tools that you can use on Linux servers or systems..."

"Security (39 percent) and employee privacy (12 percent) are the biggest inhibitors of BYOD adoption, according to the Blancco Technology Group survey...

Data leakage and loss reign as the top bring your own device (BYOD) security concerns, according to a survey of more than 800 global cyber security professionals.

The survey, conducted by Crowd Research Partners in conjunction with data security vendors Bitglass, Blancco Technology Group, Check Point Technologies, Skycure, SnoopWall and Tenable Network Security, found that 56 percent of companies are worried about unauthorized access to company data and systems..."

"With BYOD uptake on the rise in 2016, unsecured mobile devices pose a risk to UK firms. The number of personal laptops, smartphones, tablets, and wearable devices is consistently increasing in the UK, with 64 per cent of the UK population owning three or more smart devices. With 75 per cent of Europe's workforce expected to be mobile by 2018, it is no surprise that personal computing devices are increasingly being used to conduct business activities...."

"Encryption is arguably the most important single security tool that we have, but it still has some serious growing up to do. The current debate about the pros and cons of ubiquitous encryption and the FBI's request for Apple to unlock iPhones reinforces the public notion that encryption is unbreakable, even by the nation state, unless artificially weakened by backdoors..."

"First it was the NSA, the FBI and every big city cop shop on the planet insisting we need legislation to force safe, secure and for their eyes only back doors in damn near every device on the planet, presumably including light switches, garbage disposals and dishwashers. Eventually they came to see that doors, hidden or not, are merely temptations for hackers to break on through, and just decided to go on the down low for a while so they could pull a sneak attack later when we least expect it, which is a favorite trick of government types..."

"Cloud computing services have become so easy to use that users commonly upload, view and download files and access applications anytime, anywhere, from any device. But they probably aren't stopping to consider whether the files they're uploading should be encrypted, or even uploaded in the first place.

The responsibility to safeguard that corporate data still rests on the shoulders of IT, and as a matter of standard practice, IT should enable automatic encryption of every piece of information before it's sent to any cloud service..."

"There's a myth about cloud security that goes something like this: because cloud servers are managed by a third party, they're obviously less secure than owned physical infrastructure located in a data center managed by the company.

Most businesses recognize that cloud platforms offer advantages compared to owned physical infrastructure. Cloud is more resource efficient, more flexible, and more scalable. But there's often a weighing up that puts those advantages on one side of the scale and the cloud's purported lack of security on the other side..."

"Have you ever stopped to think about how much data we are creating? And even more thought provoking than that - how can we continue to store that data for the long term, reliably and cost effectively? These are important questions IT executives are asking themselves today. According to a recent report from the Tape Storage Council, Tape Reaches New Markets as Innovations Accelerate, today's advanced, modern data tape provides the answers..."

"The spread of high performance computing technologies into the broader enterprise community has gained momentum steadily over recent years. Indeed, at SC15 the HPC supplier community loudly trumpeted its collective pivot into the enterprise. Last July, the National Strategic Computing Initiative (NSCI), created by Presidential Executive Order, specifically called for more formal HPC technology transfer to the commercial sector as a necessary component for maintaining national competitiveness.

Tabor Communications, parent organization of HPCwire and EnterpriseTech, has long recognized this trend and supported it, in part by launching EnterpriseTech to serve that emerging community..."

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced it will receive a first-of-a-kind brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning developed by IBM Research. Based on a breakthrough neurosynaptic computer chip called IBM TrueNorth, the scalable platform will process the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses and consume the energy equivalent of a hearing aid battery - a mere 2.5 watts of power.

The brain-like, neural network design of the IBM Neuromorphic System is able to infer complex cognitive tasks such as pattern recognition and integrated sensory processing far more efficiently than conventional chips..."

"Increase your HPC application performance by up to 47% through the microarchitecture improvements, increased core counts, and faster memory speeds of the just announced Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 product family based on the 'Broadwell' microarchitecture. These new Intel Xeon processors have significantly improved per-core performance..."

Open Scalable File Systems (OpenSFS) announced the release of Lustre 2.8.0, the fastest and most scalable parallel file system. OpenSFS, founded in 2010 to advance Lustre development, is the premier non-profit organization promoting the use of Lustre and advancing its capabilities through coordinated releases of the Lustre file system.

Large portions of new feature development were funded by OpenSFS through dues collected from participants. Atos also contributed to the new features found in 2.8.0. Lustre now boasts added security and data protection...

Nexenta, the global leader in Open Source-driven Software-Defined Storage (OpenSDS), announced a strategic partnership with Lenovo, the world's number one PC maker and third largest worldwide x86 server provider, to drive broader adoption of next-generation software storage solutions.

"Rapid data growth coupled with modest budget increases are forcing vendors and customers to rethink their storage strategies by leveraging software-based storage as an alternative to traditional storage to meet their business demands,' said Henry Baltazar, Research Director, Storage at 451 Research. 'Lenovo is an established server provider with extensive international reach and by now leveraging a partnership with Software-Defined Storage pioneer Nexenta, the company is in a position to offer customers comprehensive storage solutions unavailable via legacy storage companies.'

NTT DATA, Inc. and Dell Inc. announced they have entered into a definitive agreement for NTT DATA to acquire Dell Services, an IT services provider recognized for its depth in vertical industries and for its offerings around infrastructure services, cloud services, application services, and business process outsourcing. The agreement reflects NTT DATA's continued focus on expanding its brand and leadership position globally...

Dell Security announced the release of SonicOS 6.2.5 for Dell SonicWALL SuperMassive, NSA and TZ Series firewalls. This new firmware extends security to Dell switches, wireless access points and firewalls by consolidating the management of the converged network infrastructure. The release also significantly advances capabilities associated with inspecting encrypted traffic, a major threat vector in today's malware economy, and meets strict certification requirements of the US Department of Defense...

Graphics drivers that are qualified to work reliably with these solutions; and,

Passing performance tests conducted by Dell using test criteria based on HMD (head-mounted display) suppliers, ISVs or 3rd party benchmarks where available.

Working closely with its hardware and software partners, Dell is formalizing its commitment to the future of VR by delivering solutions that are optimized for VR consumption and creation alongside ISV applications for professional customers.

Dell announced momentum with its Dell PowerEdge 13th generation servers, its most advanced and easy-to-manage server portfolio to-date. Customers in more than 65 countries worldwide rely on Dell PowerEdge servers to address and optimize workloads at any level, which will now include over 20% improved performance with differentiated air-cooled support and over 12 percent enhanced memory bandwidth aligned to Intel Xeon processor E5-2600 v4 updates; shipping today on the most advanced line up of Dell PowerEdge 13th generation rack, tower, blade and converged infrastructure architecture servers.

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) announced it has purchased a first-of-a-kind brain-inspired supercomputing platform for deep learning inference developed by IBM Research. Based on a breakthrough neurosynaptic computer chip called IBM TrueNorth, the scalable platform will process the equivalent of 16 million neurons and 4 billion synapses and consume the energy equivalent of a tablet computer - a mere 2.5 watts of power for the 16 TrueNorth chips. The brain-like, neural network design of the IBM Neuromorphic System is able to infer complex cognitive tasks such as pattern recognition and integrated sensory processing far more efficiently than conventional chips...

Russia's largest airline Aeroflot, has turned to IBM analytics technologies to transform the customer experience of 40 million passengers who fly with Aeroflot annually, helping to increase passenger numbers and brand loyalty.

Through the deal, Aeroflot will use IBM's advanced analytics technologies to draw insight from vast amounts of structured and unstructured data from across the company's various properties including travel booking website, social networks, IT and accounting systems amongst others.

IBM announced plans to launch its first Watson Health European Center of Excellence in Milan near the Human Technopole Italy 2040 research campus, supporting the government of Italy's initiative to establish an international hub for the advancement of genomics, big data, aging, and nutrition.

The Center is part of a long-term collaboration between IBM and the government of Italy. IBM plans to invest up to $150 million (135 million) over the next several years and bring together Watson Health data scientists, engineers, researchers and designers to develop a new generation of data-driven healthcare applications and solutions...

IBM announced plans to acquire Bluewolf Group LLC -- one of Salesforce's top partners and a globally recognized leader in cloud consulting and implementation services.

Together, Bluewolf and IBM will extend IBM's analytics, experience design and industry consulting leadership with one of the world's leading Salesforce consulting practices to deliver differentiated, consumer-grade experiences via the cloud...

IBM is making it easier and faster for organizations to access and analyze data in-place on the IBM z Systems mainframe with the new z/OS Platform for Apache Spark. This is creating new opportunities for data scientists and developers to apply advanced analytics to the system's rich data sets for real-time insights.

IBM z/OS Platform for Apache Spark enables Spark, an open-source analytics framework, to run natively on the z/OS mainframe operating system. The new offering, available now, enables data scientists to analyze data in place on the system origin, without the need to extract, transform and load (ETL), by breaking the tie between the analytics library and underlying file system.

IBM has been named the market leader in Cloud Application Development and Transformation by leading independent technology market research firm, Technology Business Research, Inc. (TBR). The recent report, Cloud Customer Research Topical Report: New vs. Legacy Applications, ranked IBM a leader in several categories including highest in customer satisfaction and in enterprise adoption for application transformation services.

The report is part of a customer research program that evaluates responses of more than 2,100 enterprises globally and analyzes the preferences around cloud and legacy application migration of nearly 700 enterprises...

Building off of last week's opening of a new Bluemix Garage in Nice, France, the launch of these practices further demonstrates IBM's commitment to fueling a new era of cloud app delivery. IBM now has four Bluemix Garages around the world, including locations in San Francisco, London, Toronto and Nice, creating a bridge between the scale of enterprises and the innovation culture of startups.

As an extension of these hubs, the Bluemix Garage Method incorporates practices and methodologies used in both client engagements and IBM's own internal transformation to a design-centric company, creating a culture of innovation and agility able to more quickly iterate and pivot in response to the market.

Fujitsu Laboratories of America, Inc. and Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. (collectively "Fujitsu Laboratories") announced the development of automatic test-generation technologies to limit excessive testing work and enhance efficiencies for agile development - an evolutionary approach to developing software which incrementally adds small-scale functions, and then one after another, makes them available.

Automatic test-generation technologies analyze source code and generate new test cases to exhaustively test software. However, under an agile development approach, frequent, repeated changes to the source code result in a large number of test cases and excessive testing work.

Red Hat, announced the availability of a no-cost Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscription, available as part of the Red Hat Developer Program. Offered as a self-supported, non-production developer subscription, the Red Hat Enterprise Linux Developer Suite provides developers with a more stable development platform for building enterprise-grade applications and enables a clear pathway to supported, mission-critical deployments across cloud, physical, virtual and container-centric infrastructures.

The Friday Five is a weekly Red Hat blog post with 5 of the week's top news items and ideas from or about Red Hat and the technology industry. Consider it your weekly digest of things that caught our eye.

The Motley Fool - How Red Hat, Inc. Keeps the Good Times Rolling -- Regardless of Sector Headwinds

Enterprises seeking to connect to Microsoft Office 365 via Azure ExpressRoute for their productivity, collaboration and storage needs can now do so through Level 3 Communications, Inc.

Level 3 Cloud Connect Solutions and Microsoft Azure ExpressRoute for Office 365 deliver enterprises a private, secure and reliable network connection to Office 365 that offers enhanced performance over connections made through the public Internet. With ExpressRoute for Office 365 enterprises can access everything in their Office 365 service, including Exchange Online, Office web applications, Skype for Business Online, OneDrive for Business and SharePoint Online across Level 3's global network.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise debuted new compute platforms with built-in support for Persistent Memory, a technology that combines the performance of high-speed memory and the persistence of storage to deliver new levels of application performance. HPE also announced new HPE ProLiant Gen9 server options and related solutions to help enterprise customers modernize their data centers.

With this announcement, HPE builds on its industry leadership in compute technology and sets customers on a path towards Memory-Driven Computing. HPE's new ProLiant Gen9 servers, which integrate Persistent Memory technology, accelerate service delivery, boost application performance and secure business transactions...

'With the significant amount of machine-generated data captured every day, we rely on NetApp E-Series to deploy Splunk for monitoring and troubleshooting the multiple platforms in our environment,' said Roy Shiladitya, head of Information Technology at ING DIRECT Australia. 'This high-availability solution gives us the ability to quickly visualize and proactively analyze the data in order to respond to the business and meet SLAs.'

NetApp announced new software for its NetApp EF-Series all-flash and E-Series storage arrays that dramatically boost the performance and value of data analytics applications...

NetApp announced the appointment of Ron Pasek as executive vice president, chief financial officer (CFO). Pasek joins NetApp effective April 11, bringing more than 30 years of experience in financial management. Most recently, Pasek served as CFO of Altera Corporation, a worldwide provider of programmable logic devices.

In January 2016, NetApp announced Jeffrey Bergmann as interim chief financial officer. Bergmann will now resume his previous role as vice president of corporate finance at NetApp.